Lately I’ve been in a few podcasts and interviews and one question came up almost every time: What is left for developers to care about or define themselves with when all the code is written by AI? Here is the quick answer: being a developer was never about writing code. Code is a tool to […]

Alex Woods:

The goal of writing is not to have written. It is to have increased your understanding, and then the understanding of those around you. When you are tasked to write something, your job is to go into the murkiness and come out of it with structure and understanding. To conquer the unknown.

The second order goal of writing is to become more capable. It is like working out. Every time you do a rep on the boundary of what you can do, you get stronger. It is uncomfortable and effortful.

Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you.

This comes close to what I was talking about in my last newsletter:

I don’t want AI to replace my thinking, and this is easier said than done. Thinking now requires self-discipline. It’s easier to effortlessly prompt the machine and forwarding the output as is. I don’t want to aim for good enough. I want AI to be a lever for better work.

Doing a thing I used to do all the time, and having some feelings about it.

It’s time to forget about the limits we’re used to working in. We need to step out of our magic circle.

To really take advantage of what AI can do, developers need to start thinking about software differently— not as the means to but as the ends. Don’t deliver tools that allow users to achieve outcomes. Just deliver the outcomes.

[…] Instead of requiring users to learn a templating system and string replacements, you can simply write custom messages en mass.

Markdown.new is a nice little tool to convert a webpage into Markdown without any fuss.

To make it even easier, I created a bookmarklet to instantly convert the page you’re viewing to Markdown.

javascript:(()=>{location.href='https://markdown.new/'+location.href})()